Producing music is an incredibly creative process, and knowing the tools of the trade is essential in order to transmit the musical ideas in your head into the DAW in a creative and uninhibited way. Whether you have used a computer to create music before, or you have been curious about production for years, this 4-week course will give you an introductory look into the world of Avid Pro Tools and Pro Tools First.

HL

This is a very useful course and Chrissy is a fantastic instructor. Would love to take another course with her - she makes everything easy to understand.

MA

Aug 23, 2016

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Great course with a fantastic teacher who kept every lesson easy to understand and interesting. Thank you for this course, it was really useful!

À partir de la leçon

Exploring MIDI and Software Instruments

In this lesson, we'll focus on MIDI and software instruments. We'll start by learning about the different kinds of sound waves. Next, we'll learn the difference between samplers and synthesizers and how to use them in music production. We'll also learn how to manipulate and automate MIDI.

Enseigné par

Chrissy Tignor-Fisher

Assistant Professor

Transcription

[MUSIC] This last section is going to cover automation. And automation is a change of a parameter in your sound that changes over time. And the most common parts of a sound that we automate are going to be volume and pan. Volume's going to be the overall output loudness of your signal, and pan is going to be left to right in stereo. Every track that you create in Pro Tools has the ability to be automated. So using your chord progression that we used in the last lesson, go ahead and go to that track and at the bottom of your track, in the left-hand corner, you will see a drop-down triangle. And if you hover over that you're going to see that it says show or hide automation lanes. Go ahead and click on that. The first thing that you will see is a measurement of the velocity that we talked about in the last lesson. So, on the left-hand side of the automation lane, you can see that there's a choice for velocity in this little menu here. When you click on it, you notice you have a lot of different options of what you can automate over time, and what I want you to choose for this first one is audio volume. I want to make a big distinction between MIDI volume and audio volume. MIDI volume, which is going to be one of your options here, is going to be MIDI automation, based on the data that comes from your MIDI controller. If you want to learn more about MIDI data automation, then you can check out some additional resources on MIDI in the reading. Audio automation which is actually volume controls based on everything going through your sampler or synthesizer already is going to be much more accurate and much more useful for what we're doing here. So even though, you're going to be playing MIDI you want to automate in audio. So, to automate volume, choose Audio Volume. You're going to see that there's a long line that goes underneath your MIDI data. And this is actually your volume of the overall track. And we can actually draw in specific volume changes that we want in this area. The easiest way to do this is by clicking on your hand tool and clicking down in this area to create a little dot. And you can see when we're in the automation lane that there's a little pointer finger there. By creating one of these dots, you can actually move one that already exists and create a fade-in and what this means is that it's going from absolutely silent, fading in to the original volume that you had. >> So, let's listen to hear what that sounds like. [SOUND] I can also use this to fade out again. Click to make these individual dots and click and drag them down. And this will have a fade in at the intro. It will get to its loudest point on the third chord and then fade out. [MUSIC] So volume automation is really common. But let's just say that you've created the automation, don't like it, and want to get rid of it. The easiest way to do this is to just get rid of those little white dots. If you hold down Option or Alt, depending if you're Mac or PC, you'll see that a tiny little minus sign comes up next to the pointer finger. While you see that, click on the dot and it will make it disappear. [MUSIC] Keep in mind that when you automate it's going to take over your fader, which means that you'll no longer be able to make overall volume changes. So make sure that when you're automating it's one of the last steps in your production. So let's try automating some panning as well. I actually liked the fade in that we had, so I'm actually going to keep that there. But once I hit the third chord, I'd this track to actually swoop from left to right in my speakers. And we can do this with automation as well. So to create a new automation lane, there's a little plus sign next to the first automation lane that we've already created and if I hover over it, it will say add automation lane. And in this option, you want to go to audio pan and then all pan types. And the reason we choose all pan types is because we have a stereo sound, so we want to pan both left and right channels. And as you can see, when I create this lane, there's a left-right for your left channel and a left-right for your right channel. And if I want to swoop from left to right, once I hit the third chord, I just create these dots the same ways I did last time. [MUSIC] And I just do them for each one of these. So, you can see that I'm going from left to right, and left to right. [MUSIC] And if I want to swoop back to right on my last couple of chords, I just click and draw these automation lanes. So, let's listen to what it sounds like. I have a volume fade in on my first two chords, and then I'm swooping from left to right for the rest of the song. [MUSIC] So with automation, you can change volume over time or you can change left to right over time. And as we continue on with the lessons, I will teach you some other ways to automate with different effects in Pro Tools. [MUSIC]